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Katrin KoehlerChina Local time: 03:51 Chinese to German + ...

A general rule

Jun 7, 2009

Bin Tiede wrote:

wherestip wrote:

Just out of curiosity, when is "ch" pronounced like the Chinese sound "希", and when is it pronounced like the sound "喝" or "克".

I'm puzzled why the traditional translation for the last name of the famous composer/pianist Johann Sebastian Bach is 巴哈.

ch在a和o的后面读成"喝"。

The pronunciation of "ch" in German can be generalized to a rule: When it's behind a hard vowel in a syllable, such as /a/, /o/ or /u/, it is pronounced somehow like "赫"; otherwise, i.e., behind a soft vowel or an umlaut in a syllable, such as /e/, /i/, /ä/, /ö/ or /ü/, pronounced somehow like "希." For instance, "Mach" has been translated correctly, in respect of its pronunciation, into China as "马赫." So, Johann Sebastian Bach's family name should have been translated as "巴赫."

If "ch" leads a syllable, i.e., stands in front of a hard vowl to form a syllable, it is pronounced as /k/ and somehow like "希" otherwise. However, we say in German "No rules without exceptions": In the southern parts of Germany, people tend to pronounce "ch" leading a syllable as /k/, so that "China" would be pronounced by a Southerner as /kina/ instead of something similar to /xina/ or, more exactly, /çina/ as denoted in International Pronunciation Alphabets. We take southern accents for non-standard. The standard pronunciation can be heard from the announcers of TV news, which is usually regarded as Hannover accent, like Beijinger accent in Chinese.

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